The Land of Ice

This trip to iceland was my fifth time there, two visits in summer and three in winter time. We have seen a lot in iceland during these trips, especially in the southern areas. The landscape is amazing and rough every time of the year, the weather is really special and unpredictable, but this is what i like in iceland, you don’t know what kind of pictures you get at the end of the trip. This time we have been 2 couples on this trip, we rented a 4WD with spikes and planned to drive around the island in 11 days. A little bit risky in winter time with its weather, especially in the eastern and nothern part of iceland, but with a good car and spikes it should be ok.

/img

After the first night in Reykjavik, a really beautiful city with the charme of a small village, we started our trip and headed south. The first day we have visited the most touristic places in iceland in the so called “golden circle” (Thingvellir, Geysir, Gulfoss, Seljalandsfoss). The next day we passed the beautiful Skogarfoss waterfall and the picturesque black beach at Vik and stayed three nights close to the well known Jökulsarlon glacier lake and it’s black beach. The area is beautiful to photograph with the lake and it’s big icerocks, which flow from a small river into the sea and from there they are washed up back to the black beach which gives a nice contrast with the with/blue ice and the black beach. This time we were really lucky and had some nice northern lights in the first night, so we stayed photographing outside until 3am in the morning while our girlfriends were sleeping inside the car.

/img

www.brauchle.org

The next day we booked some guided tour inside an icecave, which was really nice to see, but quite small, especially with a group of eight people and two guides. But we were really lucky to see the sunrise from inside the icecave which made some really nice colors combined with the blue ice.

1421598258859//img

www.brauchle.org

Afterwards we drove towards the east of iceland and its snowy fjords and did a short stop at Stokksnes, which is well known for its interessting mountains and an old viking village. On the way we have seen many many reindeers. Next stop was the geothermal area in Myvatn in the north of iceland for three nights with some nice volcanos and some nice turfhouses in Laufaus. The last night in Akurery we were again very lucky to see really strong northern lights and with all colors from green to red to purple, surely one night we will never ever forget.

/img

www.brauchle.org

After a 400km way back we spend the last hours in Reykjavik before our flight back to Germany… The trip was amazing, we were really lucky with the weather, the light and the road conditions were quite easy to drive most of the time.
I used two cameras (sony a7 and a7r) and three lenses (walimex 14mm, leica 35mm and 90mm) in iceland, i like to travel as light and small as possible. This time i used the Kodak Gold 100 preset from VSCO pack 5 most of the time for the pictures i made during the day, for my northern light pictures i used some modified 400H from the VSCO 6 pack. During my trips i did some blogging on my webpage at www.brauchle.org for my friends and family at home.